I really enjoyed the atmosphere you created: the music, the light, the minimalistic background. Animations on the main hero are great as well!

very satisfying game, good job!

The feel of this game is amazing, really like the effort that went into the arranging of all the graphical, audio, and gameplay elements to make something cohesive.

This is a really fun game the art and audio were great but I especially loved the animation. my one question would be what does the bar at the bottom actually mean? it seems to be independent of the size of the tree or how close it is to dying though the idea of watering as much as you can to keep it full still works even not knowing what it does.

Great aesthetic, and after a few rounds the flow of growing the tree feels rewarding. The attack feels good with the delay and with multiple strikes in a line. The only unclear information is when the shadows attack the tree, and how many attacks it can withstand. The game crashed after growing the tree to the top edge of the screen. Kudos for Robots with swords and watering cans.

Great game! I love the atmosphere and really satisfying animations, great job!

Thanks to everyone playing and commenting!
@chonky-animations - The bottom bar represents the level of water the tree has. The tree needs water to grow if it doesn't have any water - it starts to shrink.
@greebs - Thank you for highlighting that - i'll think of ways to improve that!

Ok that makes sense. thanks for letting me know @deadboygames. I don't think I ever noticed the tree shrinking other than when an enemy got too close. assuming I didn't just miss something obvious I would suggest possibly indicating when the tree is shrinking in some way though I couldn't come up with any good ideas. All i could think of was maybe changing the color of the bar when you have so little water that the tree starts shrinking. It looks like it only starts shrinking when the bar is at the lowest it can go so maybe make it more red. Then when you start watering it again it could jump to the orange you used which would give more of a distinction between when the tree is shrinking and when it isn't.

Holy crap its so simple and so addicting! I love it!

Incredible game, how you made this in two days is a mystery to me! Looking forward to seeing future projects

@chonky-animations That sounds good. Maybe i could also set that the tree loses leaves only when it shrinks instead of all the time like it is now. Also thanks for putting the time and writing your thoughts!

@r2isabot I'm so glad someone is enjoying it!

@nicholasm21 It was a very intense experience! but for main i took a lot of script, shader assets from my main project that i'm working on. Like for the ui and state machine, also the wobbly shader saved the day!

Nice game! I love that that the player has to shift between two different tasks.

The difficulty is brutal, tho. Also, as some people mentioned above, the purpose of the bar below is not exactly clear. First, I thought that this is a HP bar for a tree. =)

Fantastic game! The art style, atmosphere and animations are great. Simple idea that fits the theme very well my only gripe with it though was that there was no instruction as to what the controls were, at least not that I could see. My first few rounds in the game I spent mashing keys on my keyboard to see what would I could do lol

@mulberg @gnarkill Thank you guys for sparing your time to write the comments. About the controls - i didn't have enough time at the end of the jam because my internet connection sucks so i couldn't make a proper tutorial - the controls can be seen below the game window in the itch page. About the bar - ill keep in mind that if i go on and try to expand upon this project, since in the jam rules it's only allowed to fix bugs after uploading and not try to implement new features, but maybe a simple water drop icon next to the bar would clarify things./?

Very nice game. The atmosphere is very pleasant! :thumbsup:

@deadboygames I don't know about @mulberg but personally I don't think adding a water drop next to the bar would help. To me it was clear that the bar was related to water due to it filling as you water the tree and depleting if you don't. It was also clear that filling the bar was good because watering the tree was good and the colors of the bar changing from oranges to greens and blues. What wasn't clear is how the bar related to the tree. until you responded to my first comment I didn't even realize the tree shrank other than when it was hit by an enemy. This is probably because of how slowly the tree grows or shrinks most of the time and that whenever the player lets the bar drop too low it is probably while they are fighting enemies and there would be a lot more movement making that shrinking even harder to notice. There are a few other things that are still unclear about the bar to me. First how full is the bar when the tree starts shrinking? Second is the speed the tree grows at constant or does it increase gradually as the bar is filled? I'm guessing it does just based mostly off the bar gradually changing color but I cant tell for sure. I don't think the speed the tree grows at is a problem because the bar would ideally be able to convey that information. Unfortunately I can't come up with suggestion of how to accomplish that.

The gameplay loop doesn not provide much choice to the player. It's always "kill all enemies, then water tree". I think the game could be more interesting if the player was incentivized to get away from the tree, to maybe gather something. Maybe even halting the growth of the tree until you collected, e.g. if you had to find rivers of water to refill your watering can. That would introduce a it of tactics, variety and choice to the player.

@chonky-animations Thank you very much for writing!The tree grows and shrinks at a constant speed. The bar is merely saying how much water it has, that way the player would have some time to rest an do something else(only thing is that right now there's nothing else to do). I could try to make the tree growth scale with the amount of water, but then if you fill it the tree might grow too fast and then there's no challenge anymore. I would have to experiment with the growing , shrinking and watering ratios.
About the growing/shrinking confusion - right now the only real solution i can come up with for that would be growing and shrinking sounds that could be quite distinguishable and the tree loses leaves as it shrinks.
Maybe if the bar is only red when empty and blue when it has water (instead of a gradient) it would be clear that its only about how much water it has!?

@nnnikki I totally agree. While making it i had many ideas and one was to refill the can, but at the end i just lacked time. I also wanted to add combo counter as well as some flying enemies that you kill by jumping and tossing some shurikens or something.Also enemies that take more than just one hit to kill. That would maybe add some more diversity. But i do get the point about getting the player to move away from the tree. Thank you for writing!

I'm going to keep working on the game and update it. Thank you guys for your suggestions, and your time. It really helps me clarify what are the necessary steps to improve upon the game.

The graphics and music very well adapted and is it great to take care of the last tree and then what else happens? nice job!

Lets hope i'm not the one left to guard the last tree of man kind because I got rekt lol. Really liked the mood of the game and there's not much to say that hasn't been said above. Had fun with this one though so well done and thanks for the game.

The atmosphere was great, loved the assets, main character and soundscape, oddly it was very pleasant place to be, when you weren't killing blobs.

Difficulty was waaay to hard for me and/or ramped up too quickly. Also I know you put them here but throwing up the controls on screen would have been nice (I suspect plenty of people are just going to click the play link and start playing), I assumed space was going to be attack when I used it to navigate the menus, which led to a very confused first play :D.

Reminded me slightly of one finger death punch, but with more buttons to perform attacks. I do wonder if attack left / right could have just been buttons rather than arrow keys and *then* x (with watering still being space and auto running back to the tree), would have suited what exists better, but perhaps didn't fit your original ideas.

Enjoyed playing it though thank you!

Amazing feel of the game, the graphics, atmosphere and the feel of killing the blobs. Tho it was way to hard, and there could be a faster indicator of killing the blobs. Also is there a finish to the game?

Great composition of assets even if you did not make them yourselves, made for a nice vibe. I had some issues with the controls as the character automatically "turned around" randomly, but otherwize a neat game!

@gameovermexico I'm still thinking about the story line and weather i even want to have a story line :) I'm very happy you enjoyed!

@matt-greenbury Thank you for commenting! It really does mean a lot to hear that people are enjoying!

@delph Thanks for the comments. This was very useful as i used a lot of your suggestions to improve the game. Check the new version on itch. I replaced the controls and added a tutorial. Also now there's power move, combo system, multiple levels and dynamic difficulty. Thank you very much for the suggestions!

@ryjcio I now added multiple levels which are ramping up in difficulty over time so maybe you would enjoy another play. Right now i have not thought about the finish but i'll keep working on it so keep checking up!

@natwomb Thank you very much! I did make the assets myself so it means a lot ! I adressed the issue of the character moving around to slowly in the new release. If your'e interested try it again! There's also a lot of other cool stuff :)

The Last Tree Alpha 1.2. Update
https://milkboygames.itch.io/thelasttree

Wow! I really like the improvements, good work.

If you'd like some more feedback:

It took me a little while to figure out how to collect water from enemies (I think you have to press attack then *hold* down?) it wasn't clear what the circle in the controls popup meant to me. It did feel cool when I pulled it off but frustrating when I couldnt' figure out why it sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. Could consider that to be automatic and the water containing blobs to be rarer, then again when you're pushed for time you have to choose if you want to collect or not, so it'd be removing that choice from the player so maybe not.

I personally would have preferred if it only moved you back to the tree when you pressed down to water the tree to allow you to more easily chain hits of attacks together against enemies that weren't spaced so that you could continually do it, but staying close to the tree like a protector makes thematic scene too.

Finally it would be great if huge waves of blobs would occasionally come that required you to use your combo, the difficultly ramping felt quite gradual and it might have been more entering if the 'intensity curve' had bigger peaks and dips / variation

(I think this article talks about it: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3848/gameplay_fundamentals_revisited_.php?print=1
I say think but this just me trying to google to find a concept I was aware of but didn't have good reference ready, the article might not be that great, sorry!).

@delph Yes is still need to smooth down the enemy waves. The way it's set up right now is if the Tree has grown a lot the wave intensifies, also depending on the water amount the tree has the wave either intensifies or lowers, and also the chances of enemy having water and the water amount carried depends on the trees water. But right now usually there's only one or two big waves.

About the moving back - I have the intention to implement currency that you get from either enemies, or doing something else. The currency then could be spent on upgrades. One of those upgrades would be attack range. With that in mind if you move to the sides too far and if you have a long attack range it could really mess with the overall gameplay, but i still need to experiment.

Thank you for reply and for the article i'll take a look into it :) cheers!

I like the cool moves...